OS X Mountain Lion is out and available on the Mac App Store for $20, but is your Mac ready for the …
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Signed,
Eager Beaver

Dear Eager,
Good question! OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is hot off the presses, and you're right—it does include some really interesting new features. Whether you should upgrade, however, depends on a couple of things, most notably what kind of Mac you have, the applications you run, and how you interact with your computer. It's a cheap upgrade, no doubt, coming in at $19.99, and that alone may be convincing enough reason to upgrade, but let's look at the pros and cons first.

First, Check If Your Mac Can Support Mountain Lion

Before you whip out the credit card, you should make sure your Mac can even support the upgrade—many Macs that you may have thought would be able to upgrade actually can't, so tread carefully. We tackled the basic system requirements in our guide to prepping your Mac for Mountain Lion, but if you missed it, here's what you'll need:

To find out what model of Mac you have, clicking the Apple in your menubar, select "About this Mac" and click "More Info..." You'll see your Mac's model and release date, as well as the amount of memory installed to compare with the basic requirements. (Click the Storage tab to see if you have enough free space.) Hackintosh users should check Tonymac's blog post on getting ready for Mountain Lion for notes about additional requirements or potential issues.

This morning, Apple announced the next version of Mac OS X, dubbed Mountain Lion, is scheduled to…
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Next, Check If Your Apps Will Run in Mountain Lion

The vast majority of your apps will likely run in Mountain Lion, without any special updates or tweaks. Developers have had a long time to work on updates, and in our testing, even some of the beefier, more problematic applications like Photoshop work flawlessly. If you have a favorite OS tweaking tool however, that may need to be updated before its compatible with Mountain Lion. Head over to RoaringApps' Comatibility Checklist to see if your most frequently-used programs are supported.

What Version of OS X Are You Running Now?

If you're running Lion, Mountain Lion won't feel like a huge bump to you. Some of the new features, like Notification Center, will make themselves known right away, and that's great—but a lot of the other features, like Twitter and Facebook integration, will probably never occur to you unless you go looking for them. Behind the scenes features like Power Nap and Auto Save will definitely save you time and hassle, but you may not even know they're there. If you're still running Snow Leopard, on the other hand, Mountain Lion will probably be a bigger jump for you—one that will come with many more features to explore, and considering it's only $20 to skip over Lion and get everything it comes with too, it's hard to say no.

As Apple rolls in core features that used to be former apps, they get better. For example, if you love Growl you'll probably love Notification Center. Notification Center brings in system-wide alerts, makes them always viewable in a side panel, organizes them so they're easy to sift through, and even includes apps that weren't very Growl-friendly.

If you're wedded to the Apple ecosystem, the new cloud and messaging features will fit right in. Even if you already use Dropbox or Google Drive, iCloud's new document sync will work for you—it's seamless and in the background. If you and your friends all use iMessage, the ability to get and send those messages right from your Mac will probably appeal to you

Mountain Lion brings new utilities that make working with your computer easier. Apple's Power Nap, which updates your system, does backups, and syncs your documents and files to iCloud in the background while your Mac is sleeping, is a great feature. Dictation, which allows you to speak to your Mac in an almost Siri-like manner to open app and work on documents, can change the way you work with your system.

Cons:

Many Mountain Lion features are already available. The best features, like iCloud syncing, notifications, auto-save, notes, and reminders, are all already available in other apps that do the same things, and in many cases (Notes and Reminders, for example) those other apps do it much better.

None of Mountain Lion's features are really revolutionary: Mountain Lion definitely has a lot of features, but few of them are really "can't live without" features or utilities. Like we said, If you skipped over Lion and are still running Snow Leopard, you it'll be a big jump, but if you're running Lion, you really won't feel like you're running a whole new OS.

The Verdict: Do You Have $20 to Spare?

At the end of the day, if you have $20 to spend, we can't argue against getting Mountain Lion. If you see some of the features in Mountain Lion and think "that'd be pretty awesome to have," or "I'll definitely use that," then upgrade without delay. If you're still on Snow Leopard, it's a good upgrade for you. It's affordable, solid, stable, and a really quick install—it only took me about 30 minutes, and afterward all of my apps worked without issue.

At the same time, if you already have Lion and you don't see what the fuss is about, or like your Mac the way it is, you may want to hold off, mostly because odds that you'll be somehow surprised by something in Mountain Lion that'll make you say "I'm glad I have this," are pretty slim. Plus, there are ways to get the best Mountain Lion features in Lion already, even if they're not as well integrated or supported by Apple.